CAPE After School 2020-2021: Parent Class

Virtual classes vs In-person CAPE classes

We talked a lot, in English mostly, about our children missing in-person classes at Waters; the necessity of helping youngsters navigate lessons on the internet and the loss of social interaction with teachers and friends. To sum it up we pictured the pros and cons of in-person classes on a scale.  Our parents unanimously voted for keeping their children home.

December 2020

We were “down in the dumps” with worries about Coronavirus, losing jobs, quarantine, and police violence. We discussed appropriate ways to deal with our bad feelings.  How could we express our frustrations…? Piñatas!  We could make piñatas to represent our anxieties and then we could SMASH them. 

Each of us chose an injustice to illustrate; cruelty to animals, police injustice, scary monsters, the virus itself, and a couple of facsimiles of Donald Trump. The results were amazing and the funny ones made us laugh.

The English assignments focused on the vocabulary of the pandemic and later the vocabulary of racism and violence.

We have been reading “When I was Puerto Rican” by Esmeralda Santiago for many months in English for advanced students and in Spanish for beginners.  We read a few pages at a time practicing aloud to get the right cadence, looking for new vocabulary and discussing the events in this coming-of-age memoir. We marvel that Ms. Santiago can create a complex scene in only a paragraph. She is so descriptive that we can picture in our minds what each scene looks like and draw those scenes in our Art Class.

See Negi learning how to iron shirts to help her mother earn money; Senora Leona swearing in front of the class, Negi’s father making a surprise visit to Negi’s school and Cousin Angie’s pink bedroom with the ballerina lamp.